Pushkin Press signs The Maniac from International Booker Prize-shortlisted Labatut

Pushkin Press has signed The Maniac by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut, whose previous work When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.

Adam Freudenheim, publisher and managing director, bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Constanza Martínez at Puentes Agency. The Maniac will be published in hardback in the UK on 7th September as Pushkin Press’s superlead title for autumn 2023.

The UK will be the first territory in which The Maniac is published, with Penguin Press in the USA following in October along with several other European countries. Pushkin will launch the novel with their biggest marketing and publicity campaign of the year, including “innovative partnerships, an unmissable social media strategy and high-profile coverage across broadcast, print media and literature festivals".

It is the first novel by Labatut in English and is described by the publisher as “a dazzling, kaleidoscopic and innovative mix of fact and fiction that explores the limits of logic, the history of computing, and the hopes and pitfalls of AI".

The synopsis reads: “It begins with the story of Paul Ehrenfest, one of Einstein’s closest friends, who murdered his son and committed suicide after falling into despair due to the horrors of Nazism and the haunting new rationality rising from quantum mechanics; it ends with the duel fought between the south Korean Go champion, Lee Sedol, and DeepMind’s AI, AlphaGo; but the bulk of the book is dedicated to one of the great geniuses of the modern age: John von Neumann.

“As a young man, von Neumann stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power.

“After designing the first programmable computer systems, aiding the development of the atomic bomb, and making major contributions to almost all areas of mathematics, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control. In The Maniac, Benjamín Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, past the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early 20th-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.”

Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones said: "The arrival of Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac marks an exciting moment in 2023’s literary calendar. Booksellers fell in love with When We Cease to Understand the World for its fierce intelligence and inventiveness, and we look forward to working with Pushkin to launch this new novel with the impact that it deserves."

Freudenheim said: “I’m thrilled to be publishing Benjamín Labatut’s new book, another mind-bending page-turner. Labatut writes more vividly and thought-provokingly about some of the most significant scientific and mathematical ideas of all time than any writer I know. I can’t wait for readers to experience the thrills that await them in The Maniac.”